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History of the Apple Logo

11 May 2016

When Steve Job himself suggested the word Apple for his and Steve Wozniak’s company, the latter laughed and said 'It’s a computer company, not a fruit store'. And now when we hear the word Apple, the first thing that comes to mind - IS DEFINITELY NOT THE FRUIT! And there’s no denying the fact that the first visual we imagine is the partly bitten Apple logo.

And we all know how Apple is connected to Sir Isaac Newton. So there went the first ever logo of Apple Computers – The Newton Crest logo, designed by the co-founder, Ronald Wayne, himself in 1976. In the logo was Sir Isaac Newton sitting beneath the very tree from which an apple fell down (for him to revolutionize the laws of gravity!) and in the logo was written – “Newton… A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought… alone”!

No wonder Steve Jobs soon enough wanted something new, something different. He hired Rob Janoff as the designer to create a better logo for his company. Little did anyone in the company even imagine that the logo would become the most iconic logo in corporate history. According to him, the bite on the Apple logo was to really let people know that it was an apple and not a cherry. The bite also played along with the computer buffs at that time because it had a similar sound off to the word ‘byte’, a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunication.

This logo was active for 22 years, from 1976 to 1998, after which it was shut down because during the 80s, Apple had become like the ship which was about to go under and sink into the sea’s inky abyss. The logo was proving to be too expensive, and so it had to be shut down. And no. The logo was NOT inspired by the death of Alan Turing, the groundbreaking mathematician and computer scientist, who committed suicide by eating a cyanide-laced apple in 1954.

After they decided to dump the rainbow logo, and from 1998 the company came up with metal casing for its computers. A coulourful logo on metal didn’t really look good. So from 1998, they decided to go with the monochrome logo that is being used even now.